I only recently started using C-r to search in the command history. Game changer!

For me it was Windows 7 end of life. I always liked to tinker, and at the time I didn’t wanted to spend the money to get a macbook, so I tried Linux, eventually moved completely to it and never looked back.

D O double G

I daily Trisquel on my secondary laptop (corebooted X230), and it’s great!

The main issue regular user would face with these 100% Free distro is wifi cards compatibility. Most will not work and the ones that do are old and slow.

Shork goes nom

Java !

Genuinely helpful advice! Thanks!

Me too and I’m pretty sure it counts!

It’s C, but the unusual look of having two semicolons is the reason why I prefer it over while (True). It feels more like “here is the weird part”.

Very much needed for embedded systems, but I’m more of a for (;;) guy myself!

Still way better than the best LLMs can do

Maybe trying with some Raspberry Pis for your services (takes up less space, low power) and building a dedicated machine for the NAS, as suggested by @hodgepodgin@lemmy.zip, but that’s a whole different budget.

Otherwise, maybe going for some mini-pcs, more recent second-hand PCs (stronger CPU for video encoding) or just more RAM and more disks.

I guess the final price will depend on what exact machine you can get your hands on.

Nice project!

Given the tight budget, here is what I would do, especially if you are not too constraint by space and don’t mind a few extra watts of power consumption. The Raspberry Pi are getting expensive, and the 200USD will barely get you a RPi5 nowadays. You said there is no market for you for second hand sever hw, but I’m guessing it should not be too hard to get used office desktop PCs.

• Get two of these. Maybe Optiplex or Thinkstation. You can probably get something decent <50USD each.
• Get two small SATA SSDs for the OS (128 - 256GB), around 30USD each.
• Get your storage drives. You should get 3 of them so you can have ZFS raid redundancy.
• On one machine, install TrueNAS and your storage drives. Default RAM is probably enough.
• On the other one, upgrade the RAM to 8 or 16 GB (~50USD), install your favorite Linux distro, and you can run your services, accessing the storage with NFS!

To me it feels safer (against my own mess-up) to separate the storage and the services, plus this setup is fairly upgradable. You’ll probably have space to add more storage drives, even maybe a cache SSD; increase the RAM; add a third machine etc.

Of course it’s just one idea, maybe other another layout might fit your use-case better, idk.

Good luck!

Thumbs up for the thorough recap!

I am dailying Aeon for a while, which is a OpenSuse + GNOME version of Bazzite, which I also tried. I can highly recommend both!

Guess I’ll pronounce it Kh Duh from now on!

Found the KDE user!

Your welcome :D

You mean, the fancy double-s from German : ß ? I’m not aware of that for old English, I’ll look it up, thanks!

[Edit]: Okay, actually it’s the long s “ſ”, and there is no double-s in the text to use it >< But I’m adding it to my Anglisc note for later usage!

fifg

Þere is a handig (ƿorðig) limb, and þat’s “sgstemd”. Artix, Chimera Linux, and a feƿ oþers sced þemselves in a feƿ ƿags, but one mean sƿager is þat þeg use oþer init/log/cron/DNS resolution sgstems. Chimera is one of a kind (?) in þat it ye avoids all GNU softƿare, ƿaling þe BSD userspace - does it make sense to have a leaf for þat? Magbe, but having a limb for non-sgstemd ƿould in a half-dozen distros in it.

Always love to see Alpine desktops!